How do you manage business resources?
October 27, 2009 by Suzi Dafnis
Managing resources is hard for many businesses, especially for small business. How do you manage business resources?
e.g. What tools do you employ, Is there software you’d recommend? What do you outsource etc?
I’m currently compiling the next issue of our newsletter and would like to include your answers to this question. The purpose of this issue of our Women in Business eNewsletter is to show small businesses the myriad of ways that they can manage their resources to help them do more with less in their businesses.
A compilation of these answers along with your contact info (and permission of course) will be published for our community of women across Australia to learn from.
Here’s a sample of our current newsletter.
Women in Business eNewsletter
Most of our resources are outsourced:
Bookkeeping/Accounts – hourly rate bookkeeper visits twice weekly.
Trainee Office Support – hourly rate apprenticeships through a government work placement incentive – both doing IT/Administrative certification
Transcriptionists – work from home based virtual assistants/sole traders contracted hourly.
Office services – cleaning, plants, stationery etc are all external or contracted.
Most of our documentation is with Google docs, accounting software is MYOB but reviewing currently and looking into Sassu.
Thanks Annalisa. Looks like ‘leverage’ is your middle name.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’m sure other members can consider taking on some of these same ways to manage resources better.
hi Suzi
Sustainable Marketing manages resources in the following way:
* we outsource activities that are not part of our core capabilities e.g. we employ a virtual receptionist and a book keeper
* we formed strategic alliances with people who have unique skills in services we provide to clients as part of our core offering at wholesale rates e.g. graphic designer, copywriter and website supplier.
In 2010 we will be employing a part time to full time personal assistant. This reflects advice from our accountants in our quarterly planning session. It will enable us to increase our billable productivity from 30% to 50%. We will be able to obtain a leverage of 5:1 e.g. for every dollar we pay our new PA, we will be able to bill $5.
When choosing alliance partners or suppliers we look for people who have similiar values to our brand values. Next year, we will be actively looking for 25% of our suppliers to have a strong focus on sustainable business practises.
When briefing alliance partners or suppliers we provide detailed briefs and brief on the phone or in person. We provide specific timelines and checkin milestones to make sure projects are on track.
Most of our processes have been documented. We will look to put this information into wikis in 2010.
We worked with our virtual receptionist to develop scripting to answer the phone. consistent with our philosophy of sustainable business practises, we made the decision that our virtual receptionist would take the mystery shop phone call as part of recent Redland City Chamber of Commerce’s 18th Annual Business Achievement Awards for Best Emerging Business. We are the winner of Best Emerging Business.
With competent workers you can achieve your business goals.
The virtual assistant can be the perfect assistant for companies. This is because companies get the results with less of the cost and less of the stress.
The major advantage of hiring a virtual assistantinstead of hiring a regular office worker is that it comes out cheaper for the company.